Publisher's number: 25900
Genre: Chamber music
Subgenre: Mixed ensemble (2-12 players)
Scoring: fl cl-bb vln vcl perc pf
Remarks: Program note:
To the Fleeting Water Say is directly inspired by the I Ching. I composed music for 35 hexagrams, with the exploration of change as a guiding principle. Artistically, I engaged with the I-Ching as a book of wisdom rather than as one of divination: I made no use of chance. The title itself holds a double reference: to The Analects (9.17), where Confucius compares the course of things to a river in ceaseless flow, and to the final line of the last sonnet of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus, which it directly quotes.

While I sonically evoke broken and unbroken lines as longer and shorter streams of sound, I do not directly map hexagram structures onto scales or rhythms. The I Ching’s deeper influence emerges instead in the work’s structure and compositional process. For each trigram—the basic unit from which each hexagram is formed, combining an upper and a lower trigram—I developed motives and musical structures: small collections of pitches and rhythms that serve as generative seeds. These initial materials are not yet tied to a fixed expressive character. I first composed eight pieces based on hexagrams formed by doubling a single trigram, allowing these seeds to unfold into complete short works. The remaining pieces arise from combining trigram-specific materials according to their position within each hexagram. The symbolic images of the hexagrams then shape the expressive character of each piece, emerging from the interaction between the two constituent trigrams.
Duration: 60'00"
Year of composition: 2026
Status: fully digitized (real-time delivery)